Diverting Sorrows
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage DIVERTING SORROWS By Stefan Kanfer In October 1887, Dr. Anton Chekhov wrote his brother: "Our modern playwrights stuff their plays exclusively with angels, villains and...
...I don't want to tell it...
...Such was the case in fulllength works like Speed the Plow and Glengarry Glen Ross...
...Why, then, does the production at the Vivian Beaumont Theater seem so rewarding...
...In the first, "The Disappearance of the Jews," he discusses the vagaries of faith and sex with his boyhood friend Joey (Vincent Guastaferro...
...Davis is appropriately pallid and wide-eyed as the ingenue...
...Since Lvov cannot prevent the bride from loving the groom, he tries to provoke Ivanov into a duel...
...Often this has the effect of candid, vigorous expression— capturing the way people actually talk under pressure...
...Campbell's Dr...
...What Chekhov lacked as a 27-year-old amateur the current participants have miraculously filled in or transformed...
...He and the others are uncomfortably aware that faith has slipped away in the rush of contemporary life...
...To my boys, God is a retired mechanic...
...The other members of the 21 -member cast all deserve to be congratulated...
...Am I right...
...Jolly wants to remake her marriage...
...For one thing, he understands that the representation of boredom need not be boring itself, and he fills the stage with physical incident and fluent movement...
...By the time the curtain rises again, Anna is prostrate with TB and Ivanov is afflicted with selfloathing and suffocating ennui, requisite afflictions of the upper class in 19th-century Russian literature...
...For another, he appreciates what the great Russian writer told the great Russian director (and what Konstantin Stanislavsky never fully understood): Beneath the speeches of the buffoons and poseurs lies a bedrock of comedy...
...Ivanov neither defends himself nor denies the accusations, but his psyche suddenly seems to give way...
...Actually, Zinaida Lebedev (Marian Seldes) is the real villainess...
...In the second, "Jolly," he visits his unhappy sister and her relentlessly suburban husband (Patti LuPone and Jack Willis...
...Joey dreams of destroying his current attachments and seeking God in a forest, like some Old Testament prophet...
...The plan blew up in his face...
...and Judith Hawking is both risible and poignant as Marfusha Babakina, a confused young widow...
...So much for Act One...
...Clearly, none of these ambitions will be realized...
...I wanted to be original—there is not a single villain or angel in my play (although I could not resist the temptation of putting in a few buffoons...
...Indeed, the wedding is scheduled for this very day...
...That was back in 1959...
...Deeny plans to cultivate a garden...
...The next play, The Wood Demon, was a marked improvement, and The Cherry Orchard represented a huge advance...
...But we do...
...in counterpoint, Tom McGowan is exuberantly vulgar as Ivanov's estate manager, Mikhail Borkin...
...Kevin Rigdon's sets and Harriet Voyt's costumes are suitably bleak...
...Lvov, the voice of the author, seems a bit stiff, but young Dr...
...But here he is after something much deeper, and much less congenial to his gifts...
...Yet they are also to be pitied, and the cast makes certain that at the appropriate places and times, sympathy is engendered...
...Ivanov is now free to marry again...
...If Mamet was determined to comment on American-Jewish anomie, he could at least have taken the trouble to look at the Samuel French catalogue before he sat down to write...
...A pity these talents had to be squandered on an antique masking as postmodern art...
...When his characters are not strafing each other with threats, they saturate the air with the language of the barracks and the gutter...
...Nikolai Ivanov (Kevin Kline) is a welleducated fortyish landowner down on his luck and on himself...
...I give you my word," he wrote to an impresario, "I will never write such rotten intellectual plays again...
...Ivanov refuses on the grounds of poverty...
...The Playbill makes a point of quoting Mamet's petulant essay about Reform Judaism...
...out of rage and pain her wealthy parents cut their daughter off without a ruble...
...A confrontation is long overdue...
...even] though the God Jehovah, the God of Wrath and Strength and Righteousness spoke through the mouth of Charles Atlas, he was deemed quite out of place in the Sinai Temple...
...But the truth is that he has come to regard Anna's mere presence as a reproach...
...It is not the case in his latest effort...
...Riegert is especially effective when he listens, and LuPone when she talks...
...Scott Zigler has directed The Old Neighborhood with panache...
...They will simply be talked away, as yearnings usually are in Mamet plays, with the participants continually interrupting each other or repeating phrases— "Am I right...
...Lvov she has but a few weeks to live...
...The same is true of John Lee Beatty for his impressionistic sets, Catherine Zuber for her flattering period costumes, composer Robert Waldman for adroitly mixing his own music with the melodies of Tchaikovsky, and James F. Ingalls for the intense and moody lighting...
...Ivanov protests that he is not a Russian version of Hamlet...
...Chekhov might have been that way at that time...
...In the final act, a year has passed and Anna has expired...
...These are people meant to be laughed at, and Gutierrez sees to it that they are properly and often hilariously mocked...
...You don't want to hear it...
...even a brief vacation is more than they can afford...
...The intermissionless show at the Booth Theater amounts to three autobiographical one-acters centered on the middle-aged Bobby (Peter Riegert) as he makes a sentimental journey to his past...
...Drowning in debt, Ivanov has just mortgaged his lands to a pair of arriviste neighbors...
...Some time back he married a Jewish woman, Anna Petrovna, nee Sarah Abramson (Jayne Atkinson), in hopes of receiving a large dowry...
...Most of the time Mamet's dialogue is so effective that what he says has seemed less important than how he said it...
...The first is Lvov, who catalogues the moral faults of Ivanov, among them venality, cruelty, egotism, and insensitivity...
...Whether I have succeeded or not, I do not know...
...For one thing, The Old Neighborhood is not really a play...
...He grabs a pistol and shoots himself in the heart...
...Finally, in "Deeny" he parts from his old inamorata (Rebecca Pidgeon...
...Curtain...
...This naïve young woman finds his woeful countenance appealing, and when he rails fluently against the circumstances of his life, well-nigh irresistible...
...Anton Chekhov wrote his brother: "Our modern playwrights stuff their plays exclusively with angels, villains and buffoons—go and find these types in all Russia...
...As Zinaida, Seldes might have come from a court painting of decadent 19th-century royalty, and as Pavel, Wright is a splendid combination of henpecked nebbish and decent soul whose gestures supply the eloquence his words cannot...
...Partly because of David Hare's vigorous new adaptation, but mostly because the acting and direction is of such extraordinary quality...
...her timorous husband Pavel (Max Wright) has been known to offer financial aid to the younger man, once Zinaida imperiously strides out of earshot...
...As if Ivanov's circumstances were not perilous enough, more bad news is presented by the local physician, Yevgeni Lvov (Rob Campbell...
...I have not found anyone guilty, nor have I acquitted anyone...
...Fantasy, rather than religion, now seems their common refuge...
...Today, with a "growing sense of the reality of God," he remembers the religion of his youth as "inconclusive and unfortunate...
...If he fell short, his most recent interpreters have not...
...By the time the playwright had completed a seventh version he began to detest his work...
...Every scene bears the err marks of a novice: ungainly entrances and exits, overheated exchanges, an irritating central character, and a ludicrous finale...
...Out of love and impulse Sarah converted to Russian Orthodoxy...
...The encroaching years have made Bobby ponder the consolations of Judaism...
...That was all very well when he was splashing around in shallow water, commenting on the hypocrisies of Hollywood or the double-dealing of real estate operators...
...But au fond that is exactly who he is, and Kline makes him at once a fool paralyzed by indecision and a nobleman gone to seed...
...Chekov discarded several alternate endings, including one in which Ivanov succumbed to a convenient heart attack...
...To recover her health she must be taken to a kinder climate...
...But to the marriage of untrue minds Chekov admits impediments...
...David Mamet has made a considerable reputation out of staccato and scatology...
...The exasperated Sasha begs him to come to the church where everyone is waiting...
...Kline's is abravura performance...
...On stage, too, it has grown long whiskers...
...Ivanov saves him the trouble...
...Ivanov tergiversates yet again...
...By the time of Uncle Vanya and The Three Sisters in the 1890s, he had become a master...
...In Ivanov Chekhov attempted to give that insight dramatic form...
...She answers in kind, and he applies the last twist of the knife: According to Dr...
...The quartet of actors have responded briskly...
...To rid himself of guilt he spends every possible moment away from her, hanging aboutthe Lebedevs' estate, chatting up their guests and paying particular attention to the couple's pretty daughter, Sasha (Hope Davis...
...Paddy Chayefsky's play, The Tenth Man, questioned whether liberal Judaism would be overwhelmed by American materialism and the anxiety to assimilate...
...He kept his promise...
...along with Christopher Plummer's Barrymore, it is one of the year's twin peaks...
...Ivanov, Chekhov's first full-length work for the stage, has failure written all over it...
...Anna's cough is ominous...
...Bathos has been changed to pity, scattershot farce has become unified tragicomedy, unmotivated posturing has turned into a credible and stirring plot—with little help from the author...
...That tragicomedy featured a rabbi demanding of a colleague, "How in heaven's name are you going to convey an awe of God to boys who will race out of your Hebrew classes to fly model rocket ships 500 feet in the air exploding in three stages...
...In theory, then, this distorted mirror of 19th-century provincial Russia should be of interest only to Chekhovians and students of theater...
...Virtually every supporting actor is a standout...
...But in the right hands Ivanov is more than a curio, and director Gerald Gutierrez has the right hands...
...The problem of how far Jews may depart from tradition and still call themselves Jews may seem a revolutionary topic to Mamet, but among thinking people it is old news...
...Through the years the playwright has become famous for creating characters of inarticulate eloquence, people who cover their psychic wounds with a carapace of curses...
...One moment he wants to go through with the ceremony, the next he is ready to leave Sasha at the altar...
...Now he is deranged, now he is lucid...
...Musing about his countrymen, Gorky once observed that "out of the misery and murk of their lives Russian people learned to make sorrow a diversion...
...Shocked, Anna staggers off, leaving her husband with the echo of his own brutal words...
...After much hesitation on Ivanov's part, he and Sasha finally embrace—just as Anna enters the room...
...Once it comes Ivanov turns on his wife, labeling her a "dirty Jew...
Vol. 80 • December 1997 • No. 19
